Why Keep It Simple

PGA HOPE: Golf and Veterans, Notes on the concept of training a ______

Add any word you wish to that blank space; basketball player, artist, dancer, pilot, golfer. Our nervous system has limits on how much information can be processed at any one time.
We say we want golf to be fun; make us happy, but psychology studies show that anxiety while trying to solve a problem makes it impossible to experience happiness (sadness also). Good shots are fun, but to perform a good shot there are a ton of messages that need to travel from the nervous system to other body parts so we can move in a way the club hits the ball…wait I’m going down a rabbit hole! To stay on track, if a person has a sound concept of what makes the club move there is a fair chance the ball flight or roll will make the person happy; so golf is fun. The second sentence above mentions time to process information; that time is ninety minutes. So a training session shouldn’t exceed ninety minutes, and the thoughts or concepts presented to the golfer should be 1-3. Each concept of motion requires repetitions, the optimum time period to ingrain each is between 7 and 30 minutes. Even if they do great, resist the temptation of adding more to the soup in their brain because learning isn’t complete until a myelin sheath grows around the neurons that are the signal generators of future movement; golf is fun. The neurons only wire together during sleep, and may take a couple nights to really knit together. How they know to only knit the good shots is another rabbit hole entirely. So let’s keep it simple.